Ask Me About Friday, February 6, 2015

We have had a very exciting couple days.  Yesterday we celebrated the 100th day of school.  The 100's projects were great!  We invited our third grade buddies to come look at them, as well as the 100 picture display of our first 100 days. They also looked at the 1oo words we spelled together.   
Today we welcomed some of the children who will be attending kindergarten next year at Bells Mill.  They visited in the morning to see what kindergarten will be like.  We read an interesting poem with some challenging words for our Word Birds.  We used clues from the poem and what we know about wind to figure out the meaning of the words.  There were also some challenging words to read in the text, but we used what we know about words to figure out those words as well.  We also worked on spelling words and making sure we really stretched out the words and listened for those sneaky sounds at the second to the last sound in the word.  We found out that when we slow down and really give it our best effort, we can spell those four letter words with the sneaky sound near the end.  In the afternoon, we continued our 100's celebration.  We worked in teams of four to build the tallest tower we could with just 100 cups.  The teams had their ups and downs, but learned they had to be patient with each other and try things in different ways.  Of course, teamwork was the most important part, and having to come to agreement on just how the tower would be built was critical to success.  We had a nice play time, with one group deciding to Zen Doodle with me, and other groups playing in our workshop, building, and making things from scraps of paper.
We wanted to share the pictures we started our day with today.  The kids had so much to say about these two photographs.  This heron has so many interesting external features that we could have talked for a long time about them, but I had to cut off the discussion.  We shared a lot of things we noticed, wondered about some things, and had some ideas of what might be happening.  I hope you enjoy looking at this beautiful purple heron.

Have a wonderful weekend!
Juliet